Dirt Ball Anyone??

He shivered and muttered as the icy water went into the gap between his neck and his shirt. It slid down his neck mixing with sweat and grime. It felt horrible, all slimy and cold and sticky and wet. And he was too tightly bundled up to take off any of his many layers. Thick and heavy and slow he was. That was why he had been hit by the ball. Too big and too slow.

He wanted to cry. His nose was running and his eyes were wet from the cold anyway. Instead he bent down and scooped the ball from the stagnant water. Cupping it close he packed it with dirt to face his punishers. His shirt was sodden from previous attempts, hands wet and wrinkling, growing number. He breathed hot air onto them and tried to blow out some of the wetness.

He looked around for a target. Everyone was running and screaming and skidding and falling. Most had formed into gangs, temporary alliances in the heat of battle. But he had only been at school a few days. He didn’t know anyone and so he didn’t know who he should throw the dirt ball at. Not a girl obviously.

Most of them had stayed inside anyway. Not anyone much bigger than him either, or much smaller. He stood dumbly with his hand growing wetter and colder in steadily pouring rain, wondering what to do.

Smack! This time a lump hit him on the ear that was poking through his closely held raincoat. It burned cold pain into him. He burned too, angry and furious red. He saw who threw it, a big kid with a stupid grin. I hated you I hate you I hate you. He threw his missile with all the strength the cold cold day hadn’t sapped from him. It sailed towards the big stupid kid and his big stupid face.

But the kid was fast. He ducked, still grinning and laughing. The ball sailed past and smacked someone else right in the face. They fell to the ground in a heap and let up a wail. It was a little girl, small and pretty and crying. She was so loud that the playground monitor quickly ran over and scooped her up. She shot him a disgusted look as the monitor carried her inside.

That day he got hit by a lot more dirt balls.

Slow...

The Ricky Ponting over-rate controversy has been one of the more baffling episodes of recent times, but is something of a breakthrough for those who see slow play as one of the most inexcusable and avoidable blights on the game, a tedious tactic indulged for too long by the authorities.

Cricket has found some spectacular means of worsening its own product in recent times – the current craze for building stadiums which are inaccessible to those unable to paraglide, for example, or pitches as dead as WG Grace, or the rebranding of Bad Light to Mild Murk. Slow over-rates are proud members of this hall of shame, and it is curious that the fitter and more athletic players have become, the less able they have been to average one delivery every 40 seconds.

In my next blog, I will suggest some means of ensuring that over rates are crisp enough to prevent Gubby Allen spinning too dizzyingly in his grave. In the meantime, is it too much to ask for umpires to start setting a brisker example?

No slower human movement has ever been officially recorded than that of two umpires sludging towards each other to confer over the light, like a pair of amorous teenage tortoises unsure of whether to make the first move, or two unhappy commuters trying to miss the same train.

This is sometimes equalled by the funereal dawdle to co-examine the roundness of an allegedly-misshapen ball, as if this responsibility is a holy, god-given ritual as old as time itself, and the ball is a precious relic whose molecules must not be woken.

Such sloth might have been understandable in the olden days of cricket, when umpires were only allowed to stand when they had attained a sufficient age to guarantee that their eyesight had failed. Now, however, the game is officiated by primed, thrusting super athletes (or at least by fit and mostly youngish men who probably have gym memberships). And yet, at stages of matches when they might be expected to scurry urgently in the hope of providing an expectant crowd with maximum value for their considerable money, they seem to move as if they are adjusting tentatively to a brand new spinal cord.

A Delicate Tear in the fabric of...Life?? You Wish...:(

My heart plummets with my eyes as I spy a glimmer of white on a thing that should be nothing but blue. Confusion, shock, horror, desolation. Emotions ran wildly through my face, manipulating the muscles to convey the car wreck of thoughts I was experiencing. Cotton strands sprouted from the tear in the denims and I fingered it gently to see how bad the damage was. I wish I could say i got it by defending some poor old lady from a gang of knife wielding youths, or even grabbing someone out of the way of a speeding car and pulling them away in the process, but no; i snagged it on the nail that I have been promising myself to fix for the last three weeks. And so I held my pair of jeans, my prized possession of a six year and a half, and sobbed.

On the bright side of things, I am finding new uses for electrical tape.